Review of Derek R Peterson, Kodso Gavua and Ciraj Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, histories, and infrastructures (CUP, 2015) (original) (raw)

The Politics of Heritage in Africa

2015

The Politics of Heritage in Africa offers a wide-ranging analysis of how heritage has been defined in Africa and of the ongoing significance of heritage work on the continent. In presenting their project in this manner, the authors differentiate it from scholarship focused more narrowly on heritage as museum studies, and they illuminate domains outside the museum which may be understood as contributing to heritage as a form of knowledge production, including scientific disciplines and performing arts. The volume focuses primarily on Ghana and South Africa, two countries which have aggressively marketed violent pasts (the transatlantic slave trade and apartheid, respectively) to international audiences and yet whose different circumstances illuminate qualities of the African heritage economy that extend beyond particular national contexts. Chapters are organised around essays written by 15 scholars, including several who have actively participated in heritage institutions in Africa while working as academics in history and related disciplines.

Academic papers: International Conference on “Living with World Heritage in Africa”, 2012

AWHF: "The conference, hosted from the 26th -29th September 2012, marked the official event on the African continent on the occasion of celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the World Heritage Convention. More than 300 delegates attended and these included 14 Ministers and representatives from Africa in charge of World Heritage properties, 8 Director Generals/Permanent Secretaries, 25 Heads of heritage institutions, 25 local communities living in and around World Heritage properties in Africa, 19 Private sector companies (covering the mining, telecommunication, tourism and banking industries), more than 60 heritage experts and many other people who were interested in the discussions. The Conference programme consisted of colloquiums for Ministers, local communities, development sectors and experts. The Conference adopted a set of recommendations and also issued a declaration on the conflict situation in Mali pertaining to concerns on the protection of heritage places and trafficking of cultural properties." p.4

Heritage and/or Development-Which Way for Africa? Introduction to African Heritages

Globalization, Urbanization and Development in Africa, 2021

In his book, Triple Heritage (1986), Ali Mazrui reminds us of the key cultural identities of Africa which derive from indigenous African culture and traditions, from the influence of Islam, and from the influence of the West through colonialism and Christianity. Africa is not a culturally homogeneous continent and neither does it represent a common history, traditions, and customs. Far from the romantic image of Africa as a continent with a uniform and common ancestry, language, and orientation, the real Africa presents a complex tapestry of cultures and social influences that have variously shaped norms of behavior and community identities across its vast landscape. These varying historical trajectories and varied geographies also have their own influences on cultural and other behaviors, and this results not in the creation of an African culture, custom, or tradition, but a variety of African cultures, traditions, and

World Heritage and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

American Anthropologist, 2017

In the fall of 2015, I asked my colleague, Professor Helaine Silverman, if she was interested in putting together a special subsection on cultural heritage for this World Anthropologies section of American Anthropologist. I wanted the majority of the authors to be based outside the United States and Europe because issues surrounding cultural heritage management are present in many parts of the world, even though a large number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites are in Europe. 1 For years I have known of Helaine Silverman's passion for cultural heritage management, cultural heritage politics, and the role of UNESCO in designating places-many of them archaeological-as World Heritage Sites. She is, among other things, cofounder and director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy (CHAMP) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2 She has also made professional connections and official exchanges with cultural heritage management scholars, curators, leaders, and institutions, both inside and outside the United States. When she enthusiastically agreed to take on this task, we worked together to identify possible contributors, the length of their essays, the topics she wanted to cover, and her own role in all this. Afterward, she took on the tasks of contacting contributors, encouraging them, keeping them on track, and making sure their essays dealt with the topics she had assigned them, though she also ensured that they would (and could) write from their own vantage points and experiences. For all this-including the interview she conducted for this collection of essays-I am extremely grateful to Helaine. Including archaeologists and museum curators from seven different countries (Malta,

Introduction: Heritage management and tourism in Africa

Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2011

This thematic issue on postcolonial heritage management and tourism in Africa offers a selection of case studies that reveal the significance of heritage to the construction of identity in postcolonial and post-apartheid African states. Drawing insights from the critical literature on heritage, as well as from the discussion on identity as discursive and continually rejuvenated, the authors reveal the complexities of heritage management on the continent and in its nearby Diaspora in the southwest Indian Ocean in the post-independence period. In South Africa, post 1994, heritage management and tourism are still heavily influenced by the legacy of apartheid. There appear to be two processes at play. The one continues the representation of identity as bounded, primordial and ready to advance ethnic chauvinism. The other seeks to anchor new identity projects in the post-apartheid discourse of liberation and freedom. The discussions also reveal that heritage projects are regularly contested and re-grounded in the postcolony. The authors also concur that in the postcolony there is a concern to develop and maintain sites of archaeological significance for political purposes. This introduction outlines the key concepts either used or referred to in this special issue. It also highlights particular themes in heritage management, notably, the role of heritage in the construction of postcolonial identity and the role of heritage as a source of knowledge in Africa. Following Erve Chambers, the introduction also discusses the value of perceiving heritage as a category of practice rather than a category of analysis in Africa. It discusses the relevance of this distinction for an alternative engagement with heritage and its management in Africa.

The Relevance of Cultural Heritage in Remaking a New Africa

Post-colonial African society is undeniably experiencing serious development problems. Analyses of the causes and the way out have been suggested by many African scholars. For instance, Kwame Nkrumah (1974) popularly attributes the causes to colonialism and suggests a cultural revivalist solution that will revive the African cultural values of the past. But, given that these problems seem endemic, a cultural anti-revivalist like Moses Oke (2006) rejected the revivalist analysis as an over-elaboration of the effects of colonialism and the appeal to a cultural past as counter-productive. This essay, however, argues that as long as Africa is not yet decolonized strictly, colonialism cannot be totally exonerated as a cause of African problems. To African problems, there is a need for total decolonization, and the tools for the total decolonization are the rejected African historical ideals of non-individualistic life. Hence, the objectives of this study involve unearthing the real nature of “development”, showing the relationship between African development problems and colonialism in examining the revivalist and anti-revivalist views to the problems and proffering a solution, as it adopts the methods of philosophical argumentation and conceptual analysis to investigate primary and secondary data.

CFP | African Cultural Heritages: The Political Performances of Objects | Politique africaine

Call for papers for a special issue of the French journal Politique africaine. Deadline for submission of proposals: 1st November 2020 ❊❊❊ The gestures and “heritage emotions” (Fabre 2013) of politicians such as Georges Pompidou, Jacques Chirac and Emmanuel Macron in France have been extensively analysed and commented on, as have those of a handful of their African counterparts, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor (Harney 2004) and, to a lesser extent, Menelik II (Sohier 2012), Kwame Nkrumah (Hess 2001; Lentz 2017), Mobutu Sese Seko (White 2006; Malaquais 2008; Van Beurden 2015) and King Njoya (Geary 1994; Galitzine-Loumpet 2016). However, what do we actually know about the way African heads of state and their advisers, high-ranking officials and other political figures and activists considered the political role of heritage or, at a micro level (which is the scope of this issue) of sets of objects, from a personal, national and international perspective during the colonial and postcolonial periods? How did they and do they act on the definition of objects and their trajectories, thus creating the conditions for new layers of meaning (Kopytoff 1986)? At the same time, how do popular practices inform, inflect and appropriate these object conceptions in a back-and-forth dynamic?